Over the years I have read, listened to and watched almost everything on this subject as I just have not been able to 'get my mind around it'. To see this carnage effected me beyond words. The work that I was 'off to' was health care. Little did I know at that moment that the ‘garbage’ was actually people.

It was an aerial photo of a jungle settlement with what looked like a mass of multicolored garbage. I can remember to this day how I was mesmerized by the magazine's cover. I went to my local Newsagent and picked up my copy of Life magazine and started to read it on the bus traveling into work. Many of you reading this will not have been born yet but I was a young woman residing in the UK. It was 39 years ago, November 18, 1978, when 918 people were discovered in Northwestern Guyana. The Road to Jonestown is the definitive book about Jim Jones and the events that led to the tragedy at Jonestown. He even visited the Jonestown site with the same pilot who flew there the day that Congressman Leo Ryan was murdered on Jones' orders. He traveled to Jones' Indiana hometown, where he spoke to people never previously interviewed and uncovered fresh information from Jonestown survivors. Guinn examined thousands of pages of FBI files on the case, including material released during the course of his research. Guinn provides stunning new details of the events leading to the fatal day in November 1978 when more than 900 people died - including almost 300 infants and children - after being ordered to swallow a cyanide-laced drink. In this riveting narrative, Jeff Guinn examines Jones' life, from his extramarital affairs, drug use, and fraudulent faith healing to the fraught decision to move almost 1,000 of his followers to a settlement in the jungles of Guyana in South America. He became involved in electoral politics and soon was a prominent Bay Area leader. Eventually Jones moved his church, Peoples Temple, to Northern California. His congregation was racially integrated, and he was a much-lauded leader in the contemporary civil rights movement. In the 1950s a young Indianapolis minister named Jim Jones preached a curious blend of the Gospel and Marxism. From the New York Times best-selling author of Manson comes the comprehensive, authoritative, and tragic story of preacher Jim Jones, who was responsible for the Jonestown Massacre - the largest murder-suicide in American history.

The Road to Jonestown by Jeff Guinn